Re: [Evolution] Funambol, syncing, etc.

[Nick Jenkins <nickpj gmail com>]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you very much for the great explanations and information!

> Writing up your experience for LWN would be useful to get the attention
> of other developers and potential packagers.

I sent LWN a rough draft to see if they were interested, but the
response was "no":

> The article, as written, is not really suitable for LWN.  We tend to
> avoid how-to articles in general; we also write in a very different
> style than is found here.
>
> There could be a place for a look at this topic.  But there would be a
> lot more interest in a local, free-software solution than in
> somebody's web application.

So I think you're in need of someone who is a) a better writer than me,
and b) preferably someone who has set up a local server.

However, in the course of doing the very rough draft, I found myself
wondering whether SyncML could ultimately do for contacts + calendars +
notes + tasks what IMAP does for email (make it live "in the cloud", and
be remotely accessible & usable by a wide variety of clients). However
to fulfil that potential, it seems to me it would ideally need two more
things:
a) syncing of multiple folders (e.g. I have 5 notes folders, 9 contacts
folders, 24 tasks folders) - whereas currently the UIs in both the
phone's sync client and in Genesis-Sync seem to imply
single-folder-syncing only.
b) Support for SyncML built into multiple PIM clients (e.g. Evolution,
Kontact, Outlook, etc.), in the same way that IMAP comes "as standard".
However, even just having it integrated into one client, such as
Evolution, would be useful for people who seamlessly want the same data
synced on both a laptop & desktop, or work machine & home machine.

Of course, my perspective is entirely from that of a end-user, I have no
idea any whether of this is actually possible, and the amount I know
about the technical details of SyncML and it's capacities and
limitations would not even fill the back of a postage stamp :-)

> I wonder why you didn't find estamos.de first. It's the first hit for
> "syncevolution". Probably you searched for "syncevolution Ubuntu".

I'm pretty sure that "syncevolution Ubuntu" is exactly what I searched
for, hence the wrong page :-) Updating the
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SyncEvolution is probably a good idea, as it's
not immediately obvious to the reader that it's out of date information.

> Funambol only supports one address in the current release. A few days
> ago they announced the features planned for 8.0 and support for a
> second
> address is listed. With ScheduleWorld you shouldn't have had that
> problem.

I tried ScheduleWorld and it seems better for the problems I
encountered. I'd probably recommend this above the My.Funambol site at
the current time for anyone else wanting to try syncing.

-- All the best,
Nick.